Simbürger, E. & Neary, M. (2015) - Free Education! A Live Report On The Chileans Student Movement

Free Education! A Live Report on the Chilean Student Movement 2011-2014 - reform or revolution?
Free Education! A Live Report on the

Chilean Student Movement 2011-2014 -
reform or revolution? [A Political Sociology
for Action]
Elisabeth Simbuerger, University of Valparaiso, Chile

Mike Neary, University of Lincoln, England
Abstract
This paper provides a report on the Chilean student
movement, 2011 - 2014, from the perspective of the
students themselves, based on the main research
question: are the student protests for reform or
revolution? The research data was collected during
October 2013 before the Chilean Presidential and
Parliamentary elections using the methodology of
live methods, including ethnography to capture the
live action we are researching as well as a particular
analytical framework through which the action can be
interpreted. The analytical framework is made up of
paradigms which seek to understand radical political
social transformation: charisma, social movement
theory, an historical-materialist political economy,
and a critique of political economy based on an
interpretation of Marxs labour theory of value in a
postcolonial context. We refer to this methodology
and methods as political sociology for action. Each
of these paradigms are elaborated with reference to
an exemplary publication that deals with the Chilean
situation in particular and Latin America more
generally. The paper maintains that the students
have developed a sophisticated consciousness in
relation to the problems and possibilities of
charismatic leadership, an awareness of the power
and complexity of their own position as a social
movement, together with a strong understanding of
the need to contextualise their resistance within a
particular version of political economy: neoliberalism.
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Elisabeth Simbuerger & Mike Neary
The paper suggests that a paradigm based on a

critique of political economy can provide a
foundational analysis for further understanding
political society. Taken together: the methods of
reporting live methods along with this analytical
framework, the paper argues that political sociology
for action provides a realistic estimate of the powers
required not only to interpret history, but to
transform it.
Keywords: reform, revolution, student movement,

Allende, labour theory of value, charisma, political
economy, Chile, social movements, historical materialism,
postcolonialism
Significant Political Actors

Chilean students are recognised as significant actors in
political society (Somma, 2012). This recognition has
been enhanced by their activities to reform education at
all levels between 2006-2014. These reforms have been in
the context of an education system that is among the
most marketised and privatised in the world, based on a
framework that was developed during a brutal military
dictatorship, 1973-1990. Although the students have not
been successful in achieving all of their demands, they
have forced Chilean governments to instigate changes to
education policy, made education ministers resign from
office, and for politicians from all political parties during
the Presidential and Parliamentary elections in November
2013 to take the issue of education policy very seriously.
One of the most significant outcomes of the election is
that leaders of the student movement were elected to the
Chilean Parliament. But more than this, the student
movement has played a key role in the development of a
more general articulation, beyond education, of social
grievances against the privatisation of other public
services, including welfare, pensions, housing and health.
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The student movement in Chile has been extensively

studied by political scientists, political sociologists, and
journalists. This work has looked at the strength of
student network activities, virtual and real (Millaleo and
Velasco, 2013; Somma, 2013), at the creativity of the
student protest movement (Garca and Aguirre, 2014) and
at the political implications of student protest as well as
the ways in which it has shaped the higher education
research and policy agenda (Bernasconi, 2014) . This
research has also drawn on lessons from other Latin
American class based and indigenous protest movements
in Venezuela (Motta, 2009; Motta and Cole, 2013; ),
Bolivia (Webber, 2011) and Argentina (Sitrin 2006).
What is distinctive about this paper is that it gets close to

the student protesters and asks them to articulate their
own political vision for higher education: between reform
and revolution. In order to interpret and understand what
the students and academics are saying about this issue
we have developed an analytical framework based on
different models of radical social transformation derived
from the literature of political sociology with reference to
Chile in particular and Latin America in general. We refer
to this model as a political sociology for action. The
paradigms used to frame our political sociology for action
are: charisma, social movement theory , an historical and
materialist political economy, and an interpretation based
on a politics of autonomy grounded in a critique of
political economy applied to a postcolonial context. The
point is to contextualise the Chilean student movement
within a broader sociological framework of social
transformation that does not need to be geographically
specific and can be applied to other jurisdictions.
Our political sociology for action will draw on the work of

Figueroa Clark (2013) which presents Allende as a highly
charismatic political figure; on George Ciccariello-Mahers
(2013) work on the leadership of Hugo Chavez which
allows us to assess the emergence of another charismatic
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Latin American revolutionary politician through his

connection with Venezuelan social movements (2013); on
Marcus Taylors work which further substantiates political
transformation in Chile through an analysis of more
historical and materialist analyses of the structures of
political economy (2006; 2002), and finally, Ana
Dinersteins (2014) The Politics of Autonomy in Latin
America, which grounds revolutionary social
transformation in the politics of autonomy through a
critique of political economy, making links between
capitalist working class struggles and indigenous
resistance to colonialism across Latin America.
Methodology
The research was undertaken in the period immediately
prior to the Presidential and Parliamentary elections in
November 2013, including individual and focus group
interviews with students and academics as well as
ethnographic research during a protest march. A key
feature of this research is the use of live methods (Back
and Puwar, 2012) to report on the opposition to the
neoliberal university from inside the protest movement
itself. Inspired by what Les Back and Nirmal Puwar call
Live Methods, we tried to represent the voices of
students and academics in a way that makes them
heard, capturing the liveliness of the movement by
means of an ethnographic account of a protest march for
free public education. One of the live methods utilized was
a Twitter feed to report on events as they were happening
in real time, using the hashtag #lookingforallende. Live
Methods also suggests that research be attentive to the
larger scale and longer historical time frame (Back and
Puwar 2012) so as to give more substance to what CW
Mills refers to as the sociological imagination (1999).
This methodological approach encourages sociologists to
provide a determining framework that is not in itself
deterministic, as a way to, mediate personal experience
with systematic constraints, knowledge with action, while
underscoring the political urgency and epistemic difficulty
of such a demand (Toscano 2012 64). We have
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attempted to do this by connecting the real time of our

investigation with the real life experiences of students
built on a socio-historical time frame through the
conceptual framework of political sociology for action.
The objective of the interviews and the focus groups was

to learn from the students experience about the students
movement, including the aims of the movement, its
intellectual perspectives and its achievements as well as
about students socialisation into the politics and practices
of protest. For this purpose we carried out individual
interviews with students and academics and three semi-
structured focus groups with students at one regional
public university, a private university in Santiago and a
private traditional university in Santiago. Whereas the
interviews and focus groups were open to all students
(sociology in one university, sociology and psychology
students in the others), the majority of students who
participated in the research have been very active in
student politics in their departments and universities and
participated in occupations and demonstrations. As well as
the students we interviewed three academics who are
based in the same universities that the students were
attending. Informed consent of all interviewees was
sought prior to interviews and focus groups, abiding to
international ethics regulations in the field (British
Sociological Association, 2002).
Our research questions to the students and academics

were:
1. How would you characterise the current state of
student movement politics in terms of reform and
revolution?
2.What is the significance of Salvador Allende for the
political current situation?
3. What has been the impact of neoliberal policies on
higher education in Chile?
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4. How would you assess the impact of the Chilean

student movement on higher education policy and politics
and broader issues of social and public concern, e.g.,
health, welfare, unemployment and housing?
Our key objective was to analyse how the concepts of
reform and revolution unfold in quite complex and often
contradictory ways. In writing up our research and the
analysis of interviews, focus groups and our ethnography,
we decided to adopt an unusual approach, weaving in the
voices of students from the focus groups and from
academics in the presentation and discussion of our
ethnography at the protest demonstration. This results is
a pasticcio [mess] of voices, some of which were present
at the march and others who were there in spirit. By
incorporating the diverse narratives from focus groups
and interviews about the movement in the ethnographic
account of the students at the march, we give the
students demonstration the emblematic character it has
for the students movement.
Higher education in Chile: authoritarianism,

neoliberalism and resistance
In this section we deal with the origins of neoliberalism in
Chile and resistance to these policies. We explore this
implementation with specific reference to higher
education, initially through the dictatorship (1973-1990)
and its forceful implementation of neoliberalism and the
continuation and intensification of these policies through
subsequent political administrations after the return to
democracy in 1990 up to the present day. Our exposition
of resistance will focus on the student protest movement
from 2011 - 2014.
Chile is one of the most neoliberal countries on the globe

with a high level of social segregation and difference
between social classes (Undurraga, 2014). Our
understanding of neoliberalism is informed by David
Harvey (Harvey, 2005) who frames neoliberalism as a
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project that encompasses all spheres: economic, social

and cultural. Whereas this definition is quite broad, it is all
encompassing in that it captures the widespread effects of
neoliberalism on all aspects of social, political and
economic life. Neoliberalism in Chile was forcefully
implemented by the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1980s
(Grate, 2012). In his book La revolucin capitalista en
Chile, the historian Manuel Grate Chateau demonstrates
the emergence of capitalism in Chile (Grate, 2012).
Mainly focusing on the time between 1973 and 2003,
Grate shows how the belief in the seemingly rational,
neutral and non-ideological character of neoclassical
economics gave the dictatorship the legitimacy to
forcefully implement their policies, covering the areas of
health, work, education and pensions. Throughout the
book, Grate analyses how the forceful silencing of the
opposition and the rise of neoliberal economics and the
economist as the ideal figure of an academic, not only
changed the social and political reality of Chile, but also
left major marks on what is considered as relevant
knowledge and methods in the social sciences and
humanities until today: highly positivistic approaches such
as evaluation techniques, think-tank procedures and
technocratic public policy (Grate, 2012).
With regard to higher education, the reforms of the

Pinochet regime involved destroying the traditional
education system through an unregulated market
provision of private higher education with no public
subsidies, implementing different types of Higher
Education institutions and certificates and transferring the
cost of state financed institutions to students, thus forcing
public universities to acquire funding from other sources
than the state (Brunner, 1997: 226). The system mainly
remained unchallenged by the social democratic
government after the end of the dictatorship in 1990.
Rather, the legislation favoured these conditions and
within a few years Chilean Higher Education saw a
tremendous rise in private universities (Rama, 2005).
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Chile currently has sixty universities, sixteen of which are

public and forty four private.
With only 0.3% of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product)

going to universities, Chile has the lowest level of state
funding for tertiary education compared to all other OECD
(Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development) countries. On average, OECD countries
invest 1.1% of their GDP into tertiary education (OECD,
2009). In no other Latin American country have private
universities grown as rapidly as in Chile between 1970
and 2006 from 34% of all registered students in private
universities in 1970 to 74% in 2006 (CINDA, 2007). Over
the last few years numerous cases of fraud in relation to
the Chilean national higher education accreditation agency
(CNA) were revealed, where institutions received
accreditation against payment (Mnckeberg, 2013; 2007).
As a result, numerous universities had to close down,
leaving thousands of students who had already paid for
their studies without the possibility of receiving their
degrees (Mnckeberg, 2013; 2007).
During the period of the dictatorship the rights of

students, administrators and academics were diminished
(Garretn, 2005) through the installation of junta
supporters as vice-chancellors and to other roles of senior
university management. There was intellectual censorship
at all levels, including spying on students and academics
and the burning of books (Garretn, 2005). Students lost
the right of representation through the repression of
student union activity inside their institutions (Bellei,
Cabalin and Orellana, 2013 2014). Moreover, Chile is the
only Latin American nation state that still has the
constitution established by a military government. With
the reduction of public funding during the dictatorship the
burden of financing higher education has mostly been
carried by the students. This has been taken forward by
subsequent administrations such as the social democratic
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coalition Concertacin that maintained and perpetuated

neoliberal policies.
Amongst other groups in society, students had a major

role to play in the public protest against the dictatorship
from the mid-1980s onwards, during the campaign of the
NO and until the end of the dictatorship in 1990 (Bellei,
Cabalin and Orellana, 2013 2014). By then, students
rights had been seriously diminished and their legal rights
of representation have not been reestablished during the
almost twenty five years of democracy after the end of
the dictatorship.
The 2011-2014 student protests has its origins in the so

called Penguin movement of school pupils who protested
against the condition of primary and secondary education.
Despite the spectacular features of this movement,
including in particular its creative forms of demonstration
(Cabalin, 2014; Garca and Aguirre, 2014), not all of its
demands were met by the Chilean government. The
current social democratic president Michelle Bachelet who
was in power in 2006 did not satisfactorily deal with the
students demands (Cabalin, 2012). Yet, only recently
have these conditions of a segregated and neoliberal
education system been challenged by a much broader
segment of Chilean society. Since June 2011, Chilean
students from both the secondary and tertiary sector have
been demonstrating in the streets and occupying schools
and universities, pointing to the failures and inequalities of
the Chilean education and higher education system. At the
peak of the movement, almost 300,000 people were on
the streets with a high degree of support by the general
public as indicated by public opinion polls (Cabaln, 2012;
Fleet, 2012). Commentators say that one of the distinctive
features of the students movement is that students were
among the first cohort born after the end of the
dictatorship, a generation that has lost the fear to
articulate themselves politically (Fleet, 2012). The
movement has radicalised the public discourse,
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culminating in a more general critique of the privatisation

of public goods (Mayol 2012; Times Higher Education
Supplement 2011; The Economist 2011).
One of the most significant features of the student

movement 2011-2014 is that former student leaders are
now MPs in the Chilean Parliament. As such, they have
taken a key role in the drafting of the educational reform
in Chile (Bellei, Cabaln and Orellana, 2014) that was
approved in January 2015. The reform aims to put an end
to structural inequality in education, guaranteeing quality
education to all Chileans. The major elements of the
reform include the prohibition of state funding for co-
funded (semi-private) schools, the prohibition of profit-
oriented education co-funded by the state, the end of the
current school choice system where students are selected
according to their cultural and economic capital, and the
strengthening of the public sector (Gobierno de Chile,
2015). However, the plans to completely restructure both
the schooling sector as well as higher education go hand
in hand with practical difficulties of how to implement
these major changes and how to fund them As a
consequence, the National Students Federation
(CONFECH) keeps organising students marches at regular
intervals, albeit not so often as in 2011.
Framework for analysis: Political Sociology

For Action
In this section we set out the full range of analysis framed
around the concept of political sociology for action
through the various significant paradigms already
identified: charismatic (Figueroa Clark, 2013), social
movement (Ciccariello-Maher, 2014), political economy
(Taylor, 2006: 2002) the politics of autonomy: a critique
of political economy in a postcolonial context (Dinerstein,
2014). Our argument is that while all these approaches
have much to offer the most complete account for
revolutionary social movements is the politics of
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autonomy: a critique of political economy, suggesting

neither reform nor revolution but the dissolution of
capitalist social relations.This political sociology for action
approach provides a critical and interpretative framework
for analysis as well as for action, through which students
and academics can consider their positions, without
suggesting any particular strategy.
Political leadership - Charisma

Charisma has been suggested as the specifically creative
revolutionary force of history (Weber, 1978: 1117,
quoted in McCulloch, 2014: 24), changing the course of
significant political events, playing an important role in
political life (McCulloch, 2014). In spite of this, the
concept of charisma remains relatively unexplored in
political sociology (McCulloch, 2014; Lassman 2000;
Schaff, 1989) which may be due to charisma being
considered mainly as a psychological concept. However,
any understanding of charisma demands not only a review
of personal attributes and characteristics, but an
awareness of social circumstances (McCulloch, 2014: 24-
25), and can only be fully understood when charismatic
leadership mutates into charismatic rule, a form of
political domination dependent on ideological and moral
force (25) as well as the (il)legitmate use of state
violence (22). Charismatic leadership is usually
personified by heroism, moral courage, emotional
intelligence, communicative and oratory skills, and a
sense of personal vision and mission: political
vocationalism based on a sense of personal duty, usually
originating as an outsider on a journey full of trials and
tribulations to the centre of the political stage, as a
supreme expression of the human personality (5).
Figueroa Clark (2013) offers a charismatic analysis of
Allendes rise to power and as the basis for his political
project, arguing strongly of his influence on the
contemporary student protesters. Allende is presented
as a charismatic political leader in a continent renowned
for its charismatic twentieth century political leaders, e.g.
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Castro, Guevara, Chavez, Morales and going back even

further to the Chilean leader Bernardo OHiggins, and the
transcontinental legacy of Simon Bolivar (5). Allende
was not the product of a popular movement but helped to
shape it, appealing beyond it by the breadth of his
political vision, the energy of his political methods, and
the charisma of his personality (6). According to Figueroa
Clark, Allende was the product of his age, defined by class
struggle of the workers and its ideology: Marxism (11),
for which he had his own interpretation as an independent
thinker (18). Allende was always acutely aware of his own
destiny as a future President of Chile (16) to be achieved
by a life dedicated to the struggle for a total
transformation of society based on principles of social
justice, democracy and equality (26), grounded in an
empathy for the poor (28, 41) and passion to find
pragmatic solutions to social problems (29). The
importance of the charismatic principle is defined by his
own statement:
He who manages to achieve power temporarily by force is not
revolutionary. On the other hand, a governor, who manages
to transform society, social co-existence and the economic
basis of the country [after] arriving to power legally, can be
revolutionary. That is the sense that we give to the concept of
revolution - profound and creative transformation...a peaceful
revolution (Allende, quoted in Figueroa Clark 2013: 49-50).
For Allende this would take the very concrete forms of

more democratic systems of representation, with the
people as the sovereign body in Chilean politics, including
workers and members of other social organisations. All
this meant a legal system that did not discriminate
against the poor, equal pay for men and women, a
popular own force army, a living wage and system of
social security, with a guarantee of free medical care and
free education and an end to adult literacy, with sport and
popular culture promoted across all levels of society. This
would include the nationalisation of the copper and mining
industry and the banks, as well as the creation of worker
cooperatives and state owned farms, with land titles
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passing to indigenous communities. Foreign policy was to

be against all forms of (neo)-colonialism and imperialism:
The hope was that the people could be incorporated into
every aspect of decision-making, in a process of
democratisation that went beyond the realm of elections and
made the exercise of power a daily reality. This would not
only change the way Chile worked, it would change the way
people behaved. It was the Chilean method of creating the
revolutionary new man (Figueroa Clark, 2013: 96-97).
Allendes political project, or Allendismo, is described by

Figueroa Clark as revolutionary reformism (5), showing
that political compromises do not have to be reformist, or
aimed at preserving capitalism, and that reforms, by
building upon and within existing structures, can become
a revolutionary perestroika, avoiding the carnage and
waste of violent change (6).
In the current Chilean political context, Figueroa Clark

tells us of the search for alternatives to the failure of
social democracy and neoliberalism, so it is hardly
surprising that people are beginning to look back at
Allendes ideas in search of guidance (145). The students
and Chilean society are once again beginning to mobilise
against the neoliberal reforms introduced during the
Dictatorship (1973-1990) and carried on by the civilian
Concertacion government (1990 - 2010) and subsequent
Presidents of Chile. So much so that:
Today the post-coup institutionality is creaking under
pressure from the masses and there are signs that
Allendismo is once again inspiring Chiles youth, from the
nationalisation of copper, to the provision of quality health
and education, and indigenous rights. Chileans are again
demanding sovereignty and democracy. This is the essence of
Allendes legacy (Figueroa Clark, 2013: 137).
An issue here for student politics is, as we will see, the

problems created by charismatic student leaders who
have now become elected members of the Chilean
National Congress. Both the interviews and the analysis
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reveal the need for these student leaders to maintain

close links with their political base as well as with the
social movement that created them.
Social movements
There is an extensive social movement literature on Latin
America, dealing with all aspects of the regions
compelling modern history of resistance, such as the class
based and indigenous protest movements in Venezuela
(Cicciarello-Maher, 2013; Motta, 2009; Motta and Cole,
2013), Bolivia (Webber, 2011) and Argentina (Sitrin
2006). We have identified Ciccariello-Mahers text as
pertinent for the framework we are adopting of political
sociology for action.
Figueroa Clarks approach can be criticised as being too

much in favour of Allende as a charismatic figure,
underplaying the social and political forces by which
Allende came to power (Figueroa Clark, 2013). Such a
framework for analysing the rise of political leadership has
been provided by Ciccariello-Maher (2013) in his
analysis of the rise of another charismatic Leftist leader in
another country in Latin America, Hugo Chavez in
Venezuela, focusing on the social and political forces that
were prevalent at the time.
Ciccariello-Mahers key problematic is the relationship

between the autonomy of the radical militant collectives,
e.g., La Piedrita, in Venezuela and State power under
Chavezs leadership. Ciccariello-Maher argues that there is
a complex and dynamic interplay and mutual
determination between the two: social movements and
the state, the people and Chavez (2013: 6). This is
taking place in a context where the Bolivarian Revolution
has wrested power from the Venezuelan elites and made
for unprecedented social improvements, and is poised to
transform even the state itself (2013: 6). Ciccariello-
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Mahers solution to this conundrum about the relationship

between the people and Chavez is that:
...the Bolivarian revolution is not about Hugo Chavez. He is
not the center, not the driving force, not the individual
revolutionary genius on whom the whole process as a whole
relies or in whom it finds a quasi-divine inspiration Chavez
did not make the revolution it was the revolution that made
ChavezChavez didnt create the movements we created
him (7). Ciccariello-Maher argues, after C L R James, that
by avoiding the personification of social forces...a whole new
world comes into view (Ciccariello-Maher 7).
Key to this analysis is the concept of pueblo: the people,

which Ciccariello-Maher regards as a category of rupture
and struggle (8): a moment of combat in which those
oppressed within the prevailing political order and those
excluded from it intervene to transform the system, in
which a victimised part of the community speaks for and
attempts to radically transform the whole (8) as part of a
process in which dialogue and translation between its
component movements serve to provide a common
identity in the course of struggle (8). In other words, not
the usual history from above which focuses on political
leaders, but a history from below (9): the story of a
dispersed multiplicity of revolutionary social movements
(12), or the bravo pueblo (13). This is not a history of
constituted power: the institutionalised power of the state,
but a history of constituent power: that radically
unmediated force aimed against those institutions and
which itself resists institutionalisation (15).
This raises key questions about the nature and function of

the state. Citing John Holloway, Ciccariello-Maher asks is
it possible to change the world without taking power, or is
it necessary to seize the power of the state in order to
effect radical social transformation? (Ciccariello Maher,
2013: 17; John Holloway 2002). Ciccariello-Maher is keen
to avoid what he sees as a fetishisation of the state and a
fetishisation of the power of human creativity, both of
which end up with the same result, where the state is a
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superhuman entity to be either worshipped or feared but

never transformed (16).
Ciccariello-Mahers avoidance of this double form of

fetishisation is through the concept of dual power:
neither a history from above or below, but that which
exists in ongoing, tense and antagonistic opposition to
the state, straining insistently upward from the bases to
generate a dialectical motion allowing the revolutionary
transformation of the state and its institutions. The
ultimate goal of this opposition is deconstructing,
decentralising, and rendering the state a non-state,
meaning the liquidation of the current state and its
replacement with what some may deem a paradox a
government of popular insurgency (Ciccariello-Maher
19), or as a reservoir of revolutionary energy...against
the state structure in its traditional bureaucratic and
military form' (254). Ciccariello-Maher suggests this
approach offers a model for revolutionary social
transformation in a way that avoids caricatures for others
to follow, e.g., the Zapatistas, in what might be called
anarchist imperialism (20). What all of this means in
terms of the relationship between the people and the
state, is that the revolution will support the state, so long
as the state supports the revolution (255).
This is a compelling account of what constitutes the real

nature of revolutionary subjectivity. Its limits are that it is
written as a description of the activities of social
movements operating in the political sphere, with no real
connection to the substantive economic processes out of
which these political activities emerged, and within which
social institutions, including the capitalist state, are
formed. What is needed is not just a political analysis of
the movement of social movements but an analysis
framed through the paradigm of political economy out of
which the bravo pueblo history of Chile has been derived.
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Political Economy
An approach based on the political economy of a society
provides a more materialist basis for analysis than social
movement theory (Meiksins-Wood, 1998). Marcus Taylors
book From Pinochet to the Third Way: Neoliberalism and
Social Transformation in Chile (2006), provides a logical
and historical analysis of the emergence of political
leaders and regimes of regulation in Chile through
the perspective of political economy. The issue here is
that structural processes seem to overwhelm political
agency and subjectivity, with little room for politicians to
dictate events, leaving the spaces for political resistance
to occur. The limitation of this form of analysis is the
extent to which political resistance can become real
revolutionary antagonism.
Taylor understands the development of neo-liberalism as

a response to the crisis of capitalist development, class
formation and institution building in Chile from the 1920s
(Taylor, 2006: 11). For Taylor neoliberalism did not arrive
in Chile fully formed, but emerged out of a violent and
brutal process of state repression that sought to eradicate
the Marxist menace. The appeal of neoliberalism for the
Dictatorship was that it was not simply an alternative
economic doctrine for national developmentalism, but
rather it offered a multifaceted political strategy that
proclaims to refashion social relations in a way that will
depoliticise and reinvigorate society by imposing self-
regulating market institutions as the essential organising
principles of social life (Taylor, 2006: 34). More
specifically Taylor refers to the policies adopted by the
Dictatorship as a strategy of creative destruction,
informed by the principles of a group of economists
referred to as the Chicago Boys: rapid de-industrialisation,
mass privatisations, deregulation of financial restrictions
to pursue more lucrative sectors outside Chile and to
persuade finance to flow into Chile. This process was
facilitated by the privatisation of the banks, resulting in
large scale centralisation of finance in massive
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conglomerates grupos economicos exacerbated by

privatising public enterprises consolidating the modalities
of private power within Chilean society (Taylor, 2006:
72).
For Taylor neoliberalism is more than an economic

doctrine, but is rather a state-led project of social
engineering..[in ways that]..advance the disciplinary
power of markets upon social actors[i.e.] the extended
commodification of social relations and the reinforcement
of market discipline [to] enhance the social power of
money, therein paving the way for a concentration of
power around holders of money, specifically financiers
(6).
Taylor has a sophisticated theory of the capitalist state

and the market, as complementary forms of the capital
relation (Clarke 1991;Holloway and Picciotto 1977;
Burnham 2000; Bonefeld, 2000; Postone, 1993). In this
arrangement money is not a means of exchange but a
supreme form of social power forcing people to live within
the class relations of capitalist production (46-47). The
economic system on which the power of money is
based requires a strong state to enforce and police the
process of exchange, despite the rhetoric of free-
marketeers (44). It is this restriction of the working class
as wage labour that creates the basis for class struggle,
with its concomitant rise and fall in profitability, while all
the time creating the possibility of social transformation
based on the interests of labour rather than capital (47).
In this analysis of the Chilean political economy the power

of political leaders are severely constrained. Parties and
leaders emerge out of the ongoing crisis of capitalist
accumulation, e.g., the Christian Democratic Party, led by
Eduardo Frei in 1960s, who initiated a sustained process
of state institution building to deal with the crisis prone
course of capitalist development in Chile, in a programme
167 | P a g e
Frei referred to as neo-capitalist based on a Keynesian

model of expansionist policy. However, unsatisfied
expectations led to further politicisation of marginalised
groups, as new social movements and a more powerful
labour movement looked to social transformations beyond
what even the state could offer. These new social and
labour movements are expressed as the rise in Socialist
and Communist Parties in the 1960s, as the Frei
government failed to overcome economic stagnation. It
was out of this context that Allende emerged, winning the
Presidency by a narrow margin in 1970.
Allende focused on the concept of a democratic

transitions to socialism and nationalisation of key
industries as well as extended welfare programmes,
enabling the masses to take power into their own hands
and referred to as the Estado Popular. Taylor argues that
through these policies Allende was challenging the
bedrock of capitalist social relations (25), which for Taylor
is the institution of private property (Taylor 2006 25)
through the politics of redistribution. Not surprisingly
these policies achieved high levels of popular support
among the working class, but were not able to prevent a
growing economic crisis and opposition from the
bourgeoisie, and most significantly from the US who
sought to undermine Allendes government by making
the economy scream (27). Further opposition emerged as
a right wing paramilitary strategy of destablisation,
including strikes by owners of small and medium sized
enterprises who were threatened by rising wages and
resulting inflation (27), as well as moves by the military
against Allende whose government was seen as a great
threat to the survival of the basic capitalist parameters of
society (28). The coup that followed in 1973 marked the
end of national developmentalism and the space for the
emergence of what came to be known as neo-liberalism
(28).
168 | P a g e
The dictatorship sought to undermine welfare provision

by introducing market mechanisms into all aspects of
public policy, including health-care, pensions, education
reform, labour relations, social security provision, judicial
procedures, political decentralisation and agrarian reform
(85). In the initial period a policy of austerity was
introduced, depressing wages while deregulating financial
flows (61) as well as other monetarist policies, creating a
period of boom which allowed the regime to claim an
economic miracle (64). However, the policy ran up
against its limits, being unable to exploit labour in real
manufacturing industries (68) as well as a speculative
bubble through the expansion of credit and mounting
levels of debt, and a fall of commodity prices on the world
market, including copper, all of which plunged Chile into
deep recession (69).
The 1982 crisis led to increasing protest against the

repressive Dictatorship from the labour movement and
social movements as well as other oppositional forces
cutting across class lines to include parts of the
bourgeoisie and middle classes, involving some armed
resistance (101). This period sees the emergence of
moderate political parties, e.g., Democratic Alliance, and
the reformist Socialist Party that sought to maintain
neoliberal structures but within a democratic political
framework that favoured social justice and equality (102).
The increasing insecurity of the Dictatorship forced it to
set up a referendum in an attempt to consolidate its
powers, which it lost in 1988.
The post-Dictatorship government, Concertacion, is

marked as a period of continuity rather than rupture,
particularly in regard to macroeconomic policy and labour
regulation; generally characterised as a third way
between neoliberalism and social democracy, or an
attempt to mediate the contradictions of neoliberal
capitalist development while reproducing its core
institutions (100). However, the policies of the incoming
169 | P a g e
Alwyn government in 1990 failed to live up to the populist

promises on which it had been elected, in fact the new
regime would maintain and deepen the pivotal tenets of
the neo-liberal social transformation undertaken in the
dictatorship period while failing to deliver the expected
degree of civil and social transformation
(104) Nevertheless the Concertacion governments did
attempt to develop social justice within the framework of
a neoliberal model, through a social policy defined as
growth with equity by which they hoped to restrain class
conflict through the redistribution of resources to the most
in need by providing such public goods as education, as
well as training and health to raise the level of human
capital (116). On education the Concertacion have since
then taken the model further in the direction of
neoliberalism through the voucher and co-payment
system, so that the class dimension of Chilean society is
further exacerbated (182), with choice dependent on
income (183) and other anti-poverty policies based on
targeted redistribution, rather than any sense of the
decommodification of society (192), in the form of
competition for funds (193) and other attempts to
depoliticise interventions in the realm of social policy
(195).
Taylor concludes by arguing that inequalities in Chile

remain entrenched through income distribution and
institutional structures. He re-emphasises neoliberalism
not as a set of technocratic economic policies but a
process that involves deep seated social
transformation(198). He sees the reforms of the
Concertacion governments as being never anything more
than a politics of expediency (199) and as such the
Concertacion is a product of the institutional structures of
neoliberalism rather than its negation: responding to the
contradictions of neoliberal restructuring while
consolidating and reproducing the fundamental
relationships on which neoliberalism is based (200).
170 | P a g e
The strength of Taylors work is that it provides the

context in which political leaders emerge and it shows the
very constrained nature within which they are operating.
Taylors analysis is grounded in an understanding of the
capitalist state, as a form of the capital relation (Clarke
1988, Holloway and Picciotto 1977), yet the way in which
he characterises the state and its political actors, arising
out of constrained set of economic and political
determinations, makes it difficult to see where the logic
for social transformation will appear, other than through
the labour movement. However, the emphasis on the
labour movement as a force for revolutionary change
underestimates the extent to which the labour movement
is itself a form of the social relations of capitalism and
thus an agent of capitalism's continuing affirmation rather
than its negation ( Postone 1993). In order to develop
this revolutionary analysis we will need to delve more
deeply into capitalisms contradictory formations, looking
at the work of Ana Dinerstein in relation to the politics of
autonomy in Latin America in the twenty- first century.
A Critique of Political Economy

An analysis of the contradictory formations of capitalist
society are set out in Dinerstein's The Politics of
Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope
(2014). The political problematic in this book is neither
reform nor revolution, but the politics of autonomy in the
key of hope grounded in a critique of political economy.
Teeming with radical scholarship, this book reports on the
explosion of rage and hope against the injustices of
neoliberal politics and policy at the end of the twentieth
century by citizens as well as popular, labour and
indigenous movements in Latin America. At the heart of
the book lies the concept of autonomy and the way in
which it has been used by these movements of protest
and resistance - Marxist, anarchist, libertarian and
indigenous - to imagine alternative utopias beyond the
limits of the law, the state and global capital, while all the
time challenging the ideologies of left-wing parties and
171 | P a g e
trade unions. If Latin America has been a laboratory

for experimenting with neoliberalism, the book reveals
Latin America as a laboratory for resistance against
neoliberalism and a place where revolution has sought to
reinvent itself (Dinerstein, 2014: 26).
Dinerstein's work is influenced by John Holloway's Change

the World Without Taking Power (2002), a development of
Holloways Open Marxism brought into very concrete
focus through his encounter with the Zapatista uprising in
Chiapas Mexico in the 1990s. A key aspect of Open
Marxism is the way it deconstructs the domineering
character of capitalist categories through a reappraisal of
Marx's value theory of labour. What emerges from this
book is an attempt to reinvent the concept of revolution,
theorised not by capturing the power of the state; but,
rather, dissolving the relations of power, to create a
society based on the mutual recognition of people's
dignity' (Dinerstein 2014: 17; Holloway 2002: 20).
Dinerstein argues that Holloways work is nothing less
than a turning point in the theoretical activity of
revolutionary thinking. Faced with this revolution in the
theory of revolution, she argues that we can no longer
think about progressive politics in terms of reform or
revolution (18); but, rather, as a process of 'change and
becoming' (18), based on grassroots mobilisation for
radical change grounded in a critique of capitalist value
(18). She points out the forms of grassroot imagination
have already appeared in Latin America as horizontalism,
self-management, direct democracy, anti-bureaucracy
and, above all, the rejection of the state as the main site
for political change.
But how can you avoid the power of the state on a

continent where the left has been capturing state power
through the Presidencies of Chavez, Morales, Rafael, and
before that Allende; all of whom adopted indigenous and
leftist campaigns as the basis for anti-neoliberal, anti-
colonial and anti-imperialist social policies. These anti-
172 | P a g e
strategies formed a core part of what is referred to as

neo-developmentalism, that included pluri-national
constitutions and Communitarian Socialism. Dinerstein
argues that the result of these policies may have been a
reduction in income inequality, better education and
health systems and welfare, but the extent to which these
governments constituted a break with neoliberalism is
debatable; and that they might more accurately be
regarded as a continuation of neoliberalism, particularly in
relation to the way in which natural resources have been
exploited in these countries.
The result has been, she reports, since 2006 a new wave
of protests in Latin America by indigenous and non-
indigenous people: a key feature of the indigenous protest
has been the emergence of the concept of buen viver
against the policies of developmentalism. What is
important in Dinerstein's work is the way in which she
makes connections between the struggles of indigenous
people, informed by their cosmological view of the world,
and populations that have been directly exploited by
Capital. She conceptualises indigenous people as having
not been fully subsumed by Capital, by which she means
people who have not been subordinated to the process of
valorisation: she refers to this process of non-
subordination as real subsumption by exclusion. This
process of subsumption by exclusion has been an
important part of the process of making the Latin
American working class and industrial society.
In these cases autonomy means different things for

indigenous and non-indigenous peoples: for non-
indigenous people it means freedom, democracy, refusal
of work, struggles against poverty, misery and the state.
For indigenous people autonomy refers to the struggles
over land and territory rights, as well as the desire for
self-government based on customs, traditions and
cosmologies: to be revolutionary for indigenous people is
not to change (52). Most especially Dinerstein argues that
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identity for indigenous peoples is not a negative concept,

but forms an essential aspect of their struggle against
colonialism: to be a Maya or a Zapatista; although this
ability to self-define is not the same thing as identity
which is always imposed (52).
She finds the theoretical link for these different versions

of autonomy in the connection between Holloways Open
Marxism and the Zapatistas rejection of the state as a
locus for radical transformation (25): so that autonomy is
both emancipatory (non-indigenous) and decolonising
(indigenous).
Alongside autonomy as the organising principle of these

movements of protest, Dinerstein suggests the concept of
prefiguration as a pedagogic device through which
autonomy can be achieved, what she refers to as 'the
process of learning hope' (16). The desire of these forms
of resistance is not to achieve the ideal society but
through the process of struggle in and against the law,
state and capital as well as the struggle against colonial
oppression to produce what she calls excess (28): the
capacity for human life to overflow the limits imposed by
capitalist and colonial regimes of domination. She
substantiates the politics of hope through situating it
within the work of Ernst Bloch who described hope as the
'human impulse to explore what is Not Yet' (30). Despite
her Marxist credentials Dinerstein is not afraid of taking
on Blochs controversial idea that hope is anthropological '
a genuine feature of what makes us human'. She
understands Blochs anthropology as a dynamic conflictual
contradictory dialectical process by focussing on the
concept of the Not Yet and the way in which it offers the
possibility of conjuring up concrete utopias out of the
conditions that are already present in the world, however
oppressively capitalist and colonial. Dinerstein is clear:
These spaces are not, however, liberated zones but deeply
embedded in the capitalist/colonial dynamics. It is precisely
174 | P a g e
because they are embedded that they can confront value with
hope, thus producing radical change (197).
In this way Dinerstein means to overcome the sterile

debate between those who favour the concept of
autonomy and those who argue about the importance of
the centrality of the power of the state. Her elegant
solution is to focus on the prefigurative possibility of
autonomy without avoiding the problem of the state, while
all the time making the link between indigenous and non-
indigenous struggles (32).
Dinerstein offers us a framework by which we might

imagine our own concrete utopias. This framework can
also be used as an analytical device for research: to set
alongside already existing movements of resistance so as
to consider their revolutionary capacity and potential,
e.g., student protests in Chile. She refers to this
framework as autonomy in the key of hope, with four
distinct registers of hope: negation, creation, contradiction
and excess. Negativity, as we have already seen, is
encapsulated by the Blochian concept of the Not Yet;
Creativity is the creation of a new form of society,
understood as the commons or communitarian economics
(43); Contradiction is promoted through the invention of a
new subaltern de-colonialising commonsense (44) or by
the notion of the multitude, or out of the contradiction
that forms the substance of the organising principle of
Marxs law of value, the commodity-form, through which
human life subsists only in the form of being denied
(48); and, finally, excess, by which she means that which
gets beyond contradiction, as the overflow between
human capacity and the restrictions of abstract labour
(49), i.e., the product of humanitys subversive energy
(50). And all of this with plenty of space for danger and
disappointment along the way, including the recuperation
of radical ideas and their translation into the logics of
capitalist power (63-69).
175 | P a g e
Dinerstein provides an empirical case study of each of

these registers in the key of hope from specific
movements of struggle in Latin America. These are
Argentinian experiences of dignified work and the
movement of popular justice in Argentina in 2001/2
(creation); a review of the Zapatistas armed uprising in
Chiapas, Mexico, challenging and reinventing
revolutionary traditions in the 1990s (negation); an
account of indigenous popular movement 2004-5 and the
creation of the plurinational state in 2009 in Bolivia
(contradiction), and, finally, an exposition of the landless
workers movement (MST) from the 1980s in Brazil with
the development of territories of hope through popular
agrarian reform and the democratisation of land
ownership (excess). The elaboration of each key with
reference to specific case studies is a presentational
device as these registers of hope are inextricably
interconnected.
A defining feature of Dinersteins work is the way in which

it is conceptualised and brought to life through Karl Marxs
labour theory of value, reinterpreted by Bonefeld,
Holloway, Gunn and Psychopediss concept of Open
Marxism (1992, 1992 1995). Excess is derived from Open
Marxisms account of the limits of abstract labour as a
practice and principle of human activity, or doing. The
possibility of human creativity or doing is subordinated to
the production of value, imposed through the forms of
abstract labour, money and the state. However given the
nature of human capacity perpetual subordination is
impossible due to the mismatch between doing and the
value form, which cannot persist without a remainder
(184). The dialectical dynamic that forms the core of the
Not Yet is the conflictual nature of the commodity form,
between use value and exchange value, where human life
exists as the resource rather than the project and,
therefore, is always in conflict: as class struggle. In this
way the categories of capitalism, law, money and the
state, are attempts to contain this contradiction as capital
seeks to realise itself as surplus value. For example, the
176 | P a g e
state is a political form of the social relations of capital:

this means that the specific form of the capitalist state,
and its relationship with the market with which it is so
closely associated, is derived from class struggle. The
capitalist state is not the site in which class struggle takes
place but the form of the state is the outcome of class
struggle (Clarke 1991, Holloway and Piciotto 1987). That
is to say 'the state is not a state in capitalist society but is
the capitalist state' (153). Dinerstein makes the important
point that these capitalist categories are not facts of
nature but are formal abstractions: the constant
subordination of life to the rule of value' (187). The real
material basis of hope for Dinerstein is the realisation that
value is always contingent on the condition of class
struggle. Autonomy in this sense is the struggle in and
against the law of value (187): it is a real abstraction.
It is this concept of real abstraction that enables

Dinerstein to introduce the negative notion of value based
on the idea of the Not Yet: anti-value in motion, as the
substantive basis through which hope might be
materialised. Value and the Not Yet are always that which
is to be realised, so too with anti-value, 'hope is also
unrealised materiality' (190). As Dinerstein puts it:
'Value requires to be socially validated and attains
concreteness only through money. Hope is an emotion of the
cognitive kind that guides action and is only materialised in
concrete utopia...' (190).
Value and hope are conceived within the value form but
they move in opposite directions. Value and hope are
confrontational and contested as a Not Yet realised
materiality, to be achieved hopefully in the 'recovery our
power to do' (191) which is what Dinerstein means by
excess. So anti-value in motion is the production of
excess through the politics of autonomy (187). And, in
this way, the crude formulation: between either reform or
revolution is dissolved in the conceptual dissolution of the
capital relation.
177 | P a g e
In the next section we write our ethnographic account of

the students protest march incorporating the data gained
from interviews and focus groups with students and
academics. This section is given an extra dimension by a
live twitter feed that can be accessed on Twitter using the
hashtag #lookingforallende. The final part of the paper
will discuss this enlivened ethnography within the
analytical framework set out as a political sociology of
action.
Marching for education: political socialisation,

reform and revolution
There have been a long series of students demonstrations
in Chile from their high point in 2011. The Chilean
students are famous for their street demonstrations, the
creativity and ingenuity of their carnival-like performances
and the bravery of their confrontation with the riot police
(Garca and Aguirre, 2014). The students battles with the
police are all the more remarkable given the history of the
brutal repression of the dictatorship in which the police
and the legal system were deeply implicated.
We decided to participate in a major students march. We

stuffed our pockets with recording audio and visual
equipment and were determined to get a record of the
day, through an approach based on what Les Back and
Nirmal Puwar call Live Methods (Back and Puwar, 2013).
Students were willing to talk with us: they commented on
the lack of support from their teachers and academics and
wondered why their teachers were at work when their
students were on the march. It was the sixth march
organised by the Chilean Student Federation (CONFECH)
in 2013 with other demonstrations taking place in other
parts of the country, including Temuco and Valparaiso.
The key demands of the march are free education and an
end to profit making in education. The march took place
one month before the Chilean Presidential and
Parliamentary elections on Nov 17th 2013. According to
178 | P a g e
one of our interviewees this created a very different

environment for the march, with many political parties
and social movements being present, although only a few
of them are in favour of free education and have included
that as a demand in their political party programmes. We
met with friends and colleagues at the start of the march
at Plaza Italia, one of the central squares and meeting
points in Santiago. It was a hot spring day in the southern
hemisphere. We admitted to having some nerves. We
discussed our mutual situations. One of our interviewees,
an academic working on part-time and casual contracts,
said: We are like rats in a great big neoliberal
experimental laboratory. He refers here to the forceful
implementation of neoliberalism in Chile during the
dictatorship and how this had resulted in tremendous
segregation in all spheres of life. Social segregation is
reflected in urban planning and social spaces with ones
home address being a clear indicator for ones
socioeconomic background (Tironi, 2003). Students from
lower socioeconomic backgrounds go to poor public
schools and live in poorer neighbourhoods. Students from
richer socioeconomic backgrounds go to good private
schools, live in expensive neighbourhoods and go to good
universities.
The sense of tension kicked off even before the march got
going. Rocks started flying, aimed at a group of police
that appeared on motorcycles. The police presence
seemed very minimal, although reinforcements were
parked down the side streets. The dark green camouflage
of their specialist riot vehicles was effective amongst the
tree-lined boulevards of downtown Santiago.
The students express a sophisticated understanding of

Chilean political economy, very close to Taylors argument
that neoliberalism is more than simply an economic policy,
but impacts profoundly on all aspects of social life,
including educational opportunities and the political
geography of the city:
179 | P a g e
The neoliberal system has created a tremendous degree of

social inequality in Chile, and this inequality can be
encountered in many spheres and education is one of them.
Lets put it like this, understanding the marketisation of
education as a product and not as a right creates tremendous
inequality. And this can be seen walking through the city, in
the geographic distribution, in urban segregation, in the kinds
of access to schools. (Sociology student, male, traditional
private university)
The march started on time. It set off from the Plaza Italia,
walking down Santiagos main thoroughfare, continuing
north on Mac Iver, before finishing at Estacion Mapocho
after a couple of hours. Throughout the march students'
are chanting for free, non-profit and public education of
quality and for the transformation of education from a
consumer product and commodity into a right. A female
sociology student from a private university explains to us
that the main achievement of the students movement
consists in having promoted a public discourse about the
underlying foundations of the current education system:
neoliberalism. In other words, the students have extended
their understanding of political economy to develop a
critique of neoliberalism which reaches beyond education
into other areas of public service and welfare:
.. Students and people in general are asking for dignity. A

country where one can develop as a person but based on
rights. The right for health, the right for education, the right
for housing, and a less unequal society. I think it is something
much more general that one can see in the students
movement. Thats why there are not just students but also
workers, teachers, grandparents and even older people who
say "the students taught us how to be courageous"
because the neoliberal system results in a very segregated
and individualised society. (Sociology student, female, private
university, Santiago - authors emphasis added)
And so the demands of the students were quickly

supported by other sectors of society. The student
protests seemed to have become a vent for the concerns
180 | P a g e
of Chileans that they did not dare to express for so many

years. Francisco, an academic from a regional public
university, reinforces this point and explains how the
students movement started to denaturalise neoliberalism,
as a sort of political sociology for action, as the dominant
and so far unquestioned discourse:
The most important thing, in my opinion, started from the
questioning of the neoliberal model of funding higher
education and the philosophy of the model, from when
Chilean society starts to reflect on key aspects that define a
series of neoliberal policies applied to public services. So, the
students movement managed to move from an apparently
sectoral demand to a general questioning of neoliberalism. In
other words, they touched the heart of the model. They
managed to modify the common sense we had about our
approach to nature and resources, our relationship with the
state as citizens and not just as consumers. So, the students
transformed this common sense about ourselves, that we are
not consumers but that we have rights. (Francisco, academic,
sociologist, regional public university)
The systematic questioning of neoliberalism as an

organising principle of life is also reflected in a number of
recent publications in the Chilean social sciences that
outline an alternative to the neoliberal model or speak of
the downfall of the model (Mayol, 2012). A few months
after the beginning of the students movement the
unquestioned belief in education as a consumer good was
all of a sudden a subject under discussion. The students
movement triggered a discursive shift in how education
was being discussed: from the discourse on education as
a consumer good to the discourse on the right for free
public education of good quality that all citizens should
have access to.
Another student explains that the students movement

and its ideas come across in such a revolutionary way
because Chilean society had completely internalised a
neoliberal way of thinking about all aspects of life:.
181 | P a g e
I think the reason why these ideas come across as

revolutionary is that the neoliberal model has been so
successful. So many people have internalised the ideas of
neoliberalism that no-one talks about meritocracy .nor
refers to a society of equal opportunities. Access to
opportunities is absolutely unequal in Chile and so there is no
such a thing as free competition as they define it.'
....(Sociology student, male, traditional private university,
Santiago)
From the perspective of political sociology for action, the

students have emerged as a significant social movement
themselves. According to Nelson, a sociologist from a
traditional private university, this new social movement of
students has radically changed the way people think about
politics. This has extended to more ambitious political
horizons, such as the demand for a new Constitutional
Assembly in order to make up for the injustice that is
inscribed into the Chilean political constitution from the
dictatorship that is still valid today and is an impediment
to real democracy.
Remembering the more recent history of the Chilean

students movement, and the so called Penguin Movement
from 2006, it is important in order to understand that
revolutionary change does take time. Reinforcing this
point, another sociology student argues that the French
Revolution did not last just one day but that it was a
process. In a similar way, change in Chilean education is a
process that takes many years:
It was not a failure if you look at what they were planning

but its important to put that into perspective. Those of us
who study sociology know that we cant say that the French
Revolution only lasted for one day. Its a process, changing an
education system takes ten, twenty years of fighting for it.
We cannot pretend that we can achieve it all in just one year..
.In 2011 when it started again, there were demands for
free education and now even the candidates for the
presidential elections are debating this, there are discussions
182 | P a g e
about changing the constitution via a Constitutional Assembly

or inside the Congress. And that it all started with the
students movement, thats important. Its true, the
Penguins movement was a defeat, but it was one more step
towards something much bigger and today we can see it.
(Male student, Sociology, private university, Santiago)
The crowds of school kids and students are joined by

political parties with their flags. The students are chanting
for free education, but free education is not the only
demand of the march, which also includes groups of
Mapuche people demonstrating for the rights to the
ancestoral land of indigenous people in the south of Chile.
Mike took a picture of Revolucin Democrticas flag, a

symbol of a new leftist political party, unaware that the
flag bearer was Giorgio Jackson, a young man who came
to prominence in 2011 as a student leader with national
and global recognition. Jackson was putting himself
forward as a candidate of Revolucin Democrtica in the
forthcoming parliamentary election. He was elected and
took up his seat in the new Congress in 2014.
This issue of leadership among the students raises the

question of political charisma. Some of the students
explain to us that they are not too happy about Giorgio
Jackson and other charismatic student leaders, Camila
Vallejo and Gabriel Boric wanting to become Members of
Congress. Many students perceive this as a form of
betrayal in that the student leaders who came to
prominence by criticising the system now want to be part
of it. However, there are other students who argue it is
nave to think that in a country like Chile one can change
things from outside. As one student put it:
I dont agree with some of the political programmes of the

former students leaders. But I think its good that former
students movement leaders try to get seats in the Congress,
as members of political parties such as Revolucin
183 | P a g e
Democrtica, the Communist Party, the Anarchists (UNE).

They come from different political backgrounds and they
realised that they would be able to achieve much more from
within the political system - getting seats in Congress - than
from outside. So, in a way criticising them is a bit like trying
to ignore the fact that going for a Congress seat was the next
step to be taken. Well, if we stay outside the system and keep
questioning everything from the street, most likely there will
be few changes. (Female student, FG 3, regional public
university, sociology and psychology students)
The significance of charisma extends to the students

awareness of the reach of Allendes legacy into the current
political discourse. According to many students people are
still not prepared to talk about Allende even if they
agreed with his ideas or the ideas of the students
movement because the memory of being denounced as
a Marxist and the fear of being tortured or discriminated
during the dictatorship is still present in the older
generation and has totally modified peoples relationship
to politics:
'The Pinochet dictatorship worked hard to eradicate what they

referred to as the cancer of Marxism. There is a real hostility
to everything Marxist in the print press and on TV.
Commentators make negative comparisons between the
situation in Chile with what is happening in Venezuela or
Cuba. (Nestor, Freelance academic)
And, as another student put it:

It still is something complicated for many people to talk
about Marxism, for many families, for example if I think of my
grandparents, people who experienced the dictatorship and
the perspective they have.its still a bit like "I dont talk
about this" or " I dont want to have anything to do with
this"'. (Female student, FG 3, regional public university)
Several students think that Allende is a very important

presence even without being explicitly mentioned. His
184 | P a g e
ideas were silenced by the Dictatorship and during the

decades after that but they are now experiencing a
comeback with the emergence of the students movement
and other social movements in Chile:
Talking about Allende, I think that nowadays his discourse is

still there but in a very latent way in the people. In other
words, his discourse is in the people, in the things we are
trying to achieve, in the concerns of the country, its in
everyday discussions. What now is again part of everyday
discussions was once part of Allendes programme. These
concerns are the concerns of the people. (Female student, FG
3, regional public university, sociology and psychology
students)
The students tell us that at the time of Allende politicians

would have been committed to listening to the voice of
the people. In contrast, the students argue that today this
would no longer be the case. Even after the return to
democracy, according to one student, the political elite
simply maintained its own interests. This is why the
students movement is so relevant, recuperating a new
sense of the common and of the public good. Salvador
Allende in this case would represent the attempt to build a
democratic socialism, a society of rights, too. So in that
sense, the figure of Allende becomes relevant to the
extent that the student protests constitute real action to
create a more egalitarian society.
The street vendors were doing well selling fresh lemons,

which can be used as an antidote to tear gas. You bite the
lemon and the citric acid neutralises the gas. The police ,
also referred to as pacos, use tear gas as well as water
cannon filled with skunk water, a noxious malodorant
substance. The vehicles which spray the water are
nicknamed Guanacos, after a Latin American camel-like
creature, renowned for spitting as a way of self- defence.
185 | P a g e
One of the problem for the students is how to articulate a

language of revolution in an education system where Marx
and other radical political approaches, including
anarchism, have been denigrated and denied. This raises
the issue that we considered as a key matter for our
political sociology for action: how to think about the
movement for political transformation in terms of either
reform or revolution.
The students feel that this is an issue that can be explored

through political theory. Some students remarked about
the lack of Marxist social theory in the social science
undergraduate curriculum. There is a strong sense from
the students that Marxism in Chile is not only something
that is avoided by their parents generation but has been
dismantled as an intellectual activity inside higher
education:
'The topic of Marxism is not something that is taught, we do

not learn it anywhere. I believe that in Sociology you should
learn it... Nor do we see it in Psychology, or anywhere in the
school. It's not something that everyone comes to terms with.
(FG3, sociology undergraduate student, male)
And not only Marxism, but also anarchism. Students from

a private university in Santiago talked about the political
diversity of the movement and that people take different
roles within it. They worried that the intellectual
foundations of anarchism are not being taken very
seriously and wanted to make the point that for most
students anarchism is an important force within the
students movement. The students explain that some of
the anarchists in the demonstrations are amongst the
most disadvantaged groups of society and that violence is
a last resort to demonstrate their discontent:
'The movement is quite diverse and consists of different

groups. There are the students who are involved with cultural
activities and dances and then there are others who are
186 | P a g e
always shown on TV, students with hoodies. But both groups

are necessary within the movement. Those are different forms
of expression. Sometimes one tends to think, why are they
destroying things but on the other hand, they feel violated
too. There is anger, there is discontent. Those are the two
faces of the movement but both of them are necessary.
(Focus group 1, UDP)
Some of the students explain why they think some

students are so destructive:
So there is a big sense of feeling disempowered. I am a

pacifist but I also understand why they are doing it. Finally,
the system let them down and one can relate to why they
destroy everything. Sometimes they destroy or damage
chemists and banks. I dont participate in that but I can
understand it'. (Focus group 1 UDP)
One of our group decided to leave the march out of fear

that violence would develop. But as well as a sense of
increasing tension there was also an atmosphere of fun
and enjoyment, of carnival even. On the other side of the
road students had requisitioned a water hose from a
nearby park and were spraying each other to cool off in
the blistering spring heat.
We marched past a supermarket twinned with a university

that seems like the epitome of neoliberal higher
education. The crowd was about 20,000. The narrow city
streets throbbed with noise and music, which dissipated in
the wider boulevards. At the end of the march there were
speeches and music, and someone lit a fire which
attracted the presence of the riot police. A water cannon
Guanaco appeared from out of the site streets and started
spraying the protesters. While the music and speeches
carried on the students fought battles with the police,
stone throwing and avoiding capture by the snatch
squads.
187 | P a g e
We decided to leave at that point. The march itself had

been well attended but low key. The political parties had
made a difference to the atmosphere. As usual the
confrontation with the police kicked off at the end of the
march. We felt relieved, we had wonderful conversations
with our friends, we had not been arrested or had to bite
our lemons or been drenched in skunk water.
The press photos of the event featured in the next days

newspapers focused exclusively the violent confrontations,
with no serious discussion of the protesters demands in
any of the papers, or the diversity of political opinion
within the student movement.
Political Sociology for Action

It is possible to make a strong connection between the
students comments and activities and the paradigms for a
political sociology for action that we have already
established, focusing on charisma, social movements,
political economy and a critique of political economy.
Students are very conscious about the issue of political

charisma. Salvador Allende provides a powerful
charismatic presence on which the students rely for
inspiration. Allendes legacy has been enhanced by the
emergence of charismatic student leaders, Georgio
Jackson, Camila Vallejo and Gabriel Boric, who building on
Allendes legacy have been able to create a new personal
political platform for progressive social reform. This strong
sense of personal charisma has been intensified by the
charisma of the student movement itself, which is
renowned for its spectacular and creative forms of
carnival-style protests. In fact, following Ciccariello-
Mahers analysis we would argue that the student leaders
have emerged out of the student movement: the student
leaders did not make the student movement, the student
social movement made the student leaders.
188 | P a g e
Taking Ciccariello-Mahers analysis further, the student

social movement becomes a bravo pueblo (13) as a
category of rupture and struggle (8): a moment of
combat in which those oppressed within the prevailing
political order and those excluded from it intervene to
transform the system, in which a victimised part of the
community speaks for and attempts to radically transform
the whole (8); as part of a process in which dialogue and
translation between its component movements serve to
provide a common identity in the course of struggle (8).
The students social movement is further substantiated by

the way in which they have grounded their protests within
a framework in which politics is conjoined with economics:
as a form of political economy. This focus of the students
critical discourse has been the development of a critique
of neoliberalism, not just as an economic policy but as the
imposition of a particular way of life: as a social
experiment. As one academic said: we are rats in a social
experiment. Following Taylor the students understand the
development of neoliberalism as a response to the crisis
of capitalist development, class formation and institution
building in Chile from the 1920s (Taylor, 2006: 11). For
Taylor and for the students neoliberalism is more than an
economic doctrine, but is rather a state-led project of
social engineering..[in ways that]..advance the
disciplinary power of markets upon social actors[i.e.]
the extended commodification of social relations and the
reinforcement of market discipline [to] enhance the social
power of money, therein paving the way for a
concentration of power around holders of money,
specifically financiers (6).
However, it is not clear how the problems confronting

Chilean society can be resolved at the level of political
charisma, or even by the students as a social movement
who have been able to conceptualise the predicament of
Chilean society within the paradigm of a neoliberal
political economy. Dinersteins critique of political
189 | P a g e
economy suggests a more profound understanding is

required based on a deeper understanding of the
organising principle of capitalist society. This deeper level
of analysis was identified by Marx as the labour theory of
value, now brought back to life through a contemporary
reappraisal of his work in the form of Open Marxism. So
the project becomes for students and academics in
dialogue with Chilean political society to critically engage
with the conceptual framework that Dinerstein has
developed: anti-value in motion (Dinerstein 2015,
Dinerstein and Neary, 2002), building on the categories of
creativity, negation, contradiction and excess so as to
further develop a politics of autonomy in the key of hope.
Live Sociology - sustaining the sociological

imagination
In this paper we have sought to create a political
sociology for action through the use of Live Methods,
featuring a combination of writing styles, with a pasticcio
of voices from focus groups and interviews incorporated
as part of an ethnography of a student protest march, as
well as the use of the Twitter social media platform. All
of this within a theoretical framework that has provided a
set of analytical tools through which to consider the
students understandings of their situation. We would
argue that this method provides further substance to C W
Mills' concept of the the sociological imagination as a way
of representing the private troubles of students and others
together with public issues in the context of a socio-
political totality. The theoretical framework we have
described as 'a political sociology for action' offers a way
beyond the dichotomous debate between reform and
revolution, appreciating political society in terms of more
fundamental levels of dimensionality: to see it
whole[and in a way that] is rarely met by
contemporary social sciences (Toscano in Back and Puwar
2012 65). We suggest that through this theoretical
framing it might be possible to overcome the sense of
powerless anxiety, while at the same time providing a
190 | P a g e
realistic estimate of the powers necessary to alter,

however minimally, the course of history (Toscano 2012
68).
As academics working in the traumatic environment of the

neo-liberal capitalist university, we feel that collaborating
with our radical student movements to overcome a sense
of powerlessness is a good place to start. They can teach
us how to be courageous.
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Simbürger, E. & Neary, M. (2015) - Free Education! A Live Report On The Chileans Student Movement

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Free Education! A Live Report on the Chilean Student Movement 2011-2014 - reform or revolution?

Free Education! A Live Report on the

Elisabeth Simbuerger, University of Valparaiso, Chile

The paper suggests that a paradigm based on a

Keywords: reform, revolution, student movement,

Significant Political Actors

The student movement in Chile has been extensively

What is distinctive about this paper is that it gets close to

Our political sociology for action will draw on the work of

Latin American revolutionary politician through his

attempted to do this by connecting the real time of our

The objective of the interviews and the focus groups was

Our research questions to the students and academics

4. How would you assess the impact of the Chilean

Higher education in Chile: authoritarianism,

Chile is one of the most neoliberal countries on the globe

project that encompasses all spheres: economic, social

With regard to higher education, the reforms of the

Chile currently has sixty universities, sixteen of which are

With only 0.3% of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product)

During the period of the dictatorship the rights of

coalition Concertacin that maintained and perpetuated

Amongst other groups in society, students had a major

The 2011-2014 student protests has its origins in the so

culminating in a more general critique of the privatisation

One of the most significant features of the student

Framework for analysis: Political Sociology

autonomy: a critique of political economy, suggesting

Political leadership - Charisma

Castro, Guevara, Chavez, Morales and going back even

For Allende this would take the very concrete forms of

passing to indigenous communities. Foreign policy was to

Allendes political project, or Allendismo, is described by

In the current Chilean political context, Figueroa Clark

An issue here for student politics is, as we will see, the

reveal the need for these student leaders to maintain

Figueroa Clarks approach can be criticised as being too

Ciccariello-Mahers key problematic is the relationship

Mahers solution to this conundrum about the relationship

Key to this analysis is the concept of pueblo: the people,

This raises key questions about the nature and function of

superhuman entity to be either worshipped or feared but

Ciccariello-Mahers avoidance of this double form of

This is a compelling account of what constitutes the real

Taylor understands the development of neo-liberalism as

conglomerates grupos economicos exacerbated by

For Taylor neoliberalism is more than an economic

Taylor has a sophisticated theory of the capitalist state

In this analysis of the Chilean political economy the power

Frei referred to as neo-capitalist based on a Keynesian

Allende focused on the concept of a democratic

The dictatorship sought to undermine welfare provision

The 1982 crisis led to increasing protest against the

The post-Dictatorship government, Concertacion, is

Alwyn government in 1990 failed to live up to the populist

Taylor concludes by arguing that inequalities in Chile

The strength of Taylors work is that it provides the

A Critique of Political Economy

trade unions. If Latin America has been a laboratory

Dinerstein's work is influenced by John Holloway's Change

But how can you avoid the power of the state on a

strategies formed a core part of what is referred to as

In these cases autonomy means different things for